Option for using external SMTP server

In light of DMARC and the always present need for email authentication like DKIM and SPF, letting us use our own smtp server would be really useful to make sure our email reaches our recipients.

I agree. I'm using Mandrill for all my transactional emails, it would be nice if I could route Freshdesk emails through it.

Oh this can't come quick enough, we also use Mandrill for transactional emails. But I'll happy use any transactional provider that let's me view the  delivery status of the ticket. In particular the ability to prove to someone a reply was delivered to their systems, on days like to day it could save me hours in troubleshooting.

@NickLooks like this is already here in the Forest plan.

Well that's a bummer, never noticed that. But this little shop certainly won't be paying $70 a month per agent :(

1. Would be nice, if they had given some information on that new feature here.

2. Such a standard option only available in the most expensive plan? Are you kidding me?!

Great example this morning why I think it's a bad idea to not make that available to all plans. I've been troubleshooting an issue for a few days where a client couldn't receive our emails. As I have no ability to check delivery status of an email, I wanted them to check if delivery attempts had been made to their mail server. This took a while, probably burnt 2-3 hours of valuable time on it.

Turns out no delivery attempts were being made. So I asked Freshdesk to look into it. Turns out back at the beginning of March there was a problem with the customers mailserver where it was refusing mail. As a result Sendgrid, Freshdesks transactional email provider blacklisted that domain. 

Trouble is there is no way of me knowing this, I don't get notified, I continue to send emails, they continue to not get there. My customer understandably then thinks we are useless with a poor response time. It's no fault of ours, nor the customer.

Unless Freshdesk want to provide better handling of these events, charging me $70 an agent to work around this is short sighted. 

@JanNeumann @Nick

Custom Mail Server was aimed at customers wanting to buy the enterprise suite for added security. All mails will be sent through their servers and data security is left upto their mail provider. They can also enable ip restrictions in Forest plan to control who accesses the portal.

Hi Janani,

Thanks for following up here. It's great to see you have taken feedback onboard and are looking to implement some of my suggestions. I think it would be worth extending the feature to notify the admin of blacklisting to include notification other delivery problems at a ticket level. That's been one of my issues with other helpdesks, spell an address wrong and it could take sometime to realise the reply never got there. Although that might be what your referring to by "email drops" maybe.

Top marks to Freshdesk here, when I reached out to them with my problems here they have gone out their way to solve all my problems. I do think it would still be worth considering some limited option to take control of delivery on lesser plans, access to delivery reports alone is an essential tool. I'm sure a more limited form of this could be provided by just allowing us to use our own sendgrid account maybe?

I would like to implement DMARC and have added a CNAME to my domain using "smtpapi._domainkey", per sendgrid's recommendation (I do not use sendgrid whitelabel, but this should work for DMARC alignment purposes).

Emails sent via email.freshdesk.com DO pass DKIM (and SPF), but they are still not aligned for DMARC. In order to align them I need to know the CNAME specific for Freshdesk I need to setup for my domain (does anyone know? it will take days for Freshdesk support to answer this).

Paying an extra $60 a month is out of the question.

PS: As a side FYI note, since freshdesk emails are sent via sendgrid, there's no need to add an "include:email.freshdesk.com" to your SPF record. Instead, just add "include:sendgrid.net" to your SPF record. It will match all the IPs used by Freshdesk (since they are Sendgrid's IPs) AND it will result in one less DNS lookup for your SPF record (there is a limit of 10 DNS lookups per SPF record. Keep in mind that some SPF verifiers might incorrectly say your email passed SPF, when in fact it could still be rejected by servers which properly enforce RFC 7208/4408). I found this out on my own, as my email asking freshdesk has been without an answer for two days and I could not wait any longer to get SPF working.

Hello,

no news since 8 months ?

PS : it's include:sendgrid.biz now, it seems.

Indeed having all email sent via mandrillapp or sendgrid would be nice, an unified view of all the email sent from our domain.

I would also like to be able to send email from, for example: support@mycompany.com For me this is the only remaining issue for clearly choosing Freshdesk over a competitor. Any news on being able to do this below the "Forest" level?

Folks,

The option to use custom SMTP server is available on the Forest plan. Read more here: Custom SMTP

We understand that the common reasons for switching over to custom SMTP are: 1. Improved deliverability 2. Delivery failure notifications

You can opt for the default Freshdesk email servers in case if you're not on Forest. Keeping the above mentioned options in mind, we've incorporated the option to sign emails digitally using DKIM and also notify agents when there's an email delivery failure.

Cheers!